Last Thursday’s FREE business blogging TeleClass hosted by the Business Owner’s Journal and powered by the Business Owners Coaching Club was a BIG hit. On Friday September 23rd we shared part 1 of the audio business coaching session in a business podcast.

Now today we have part 2.

Whether you’re new to business blogging or you’re blogging for your business with little results — this two-part business coaching podcast specifically for small business owners and professionals will reveal the core secrets to the successful integration of business blogging, business podcasts, and RSS into your overall marketing strategy.

With what you’ll learn in this two-part podcast you’ll have a huge jump-start on your competitors. And you’ll have a decided advantage over the vast majority of business bloggers struggling to get it right on their own.

Don’t miss out!

Listen to part 2 of Boosting Business With Business Blogs on your MP3 player or desktop via the MP3 enclosure (a true business podcast.)

Or if you’re new to business blogging and business podcasting — listen online using the easy to operate buttons below.

Are you a business owner or a professional who would like to have everything at your disposal to start reaping the rewards of effective business blogging in a matter of weeks - instead of stumbling through hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in needless trial-and-error?

Then no matter what your experience level of business blogging — Marketing With Business Blogs is the competitive advantage you need. Check out the limited special that’s now being offered.

Just click on the manual below…

Enjoy!

John-Paul Micek is known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™. He’s a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin, and a managing partner with the international small business coaching company RPM Success Group Inc.®

The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Yesterday’s FREE business blogging TeleClass hosted by the Business Owner’s Journal and powered by the Business Owners Coaching Club was a hit. Whether you’re new to business blogging or you’re blogging for your business with little results — this two-part business coaching podcast specifically for small business owners and professionals will reveal the core secrets to the successful integration of business blogging, business podcasts, and RSS into your overall marketing strategy.

With what you’ll learn in this two-part podcast you’ll have a huge jump-start on your competitors. And you’ll have a decided advantage over the vast majority of business bloggers struggling to get it right on their own.

Don’t miss out!

Listen to part 1 of Boosting Business With Business Blogs on your MP3 player or desktop via the MP3 enclosure (a true business podcast.)

Or if you’re new to business blogging and business podcasting — listen online using the easy to operate buttons below.

Are you a business owner or a professional who would like to have everything at your disposal to start reaping the rewards of effective business blogging in a matter of weeks - instead of stumbling through hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in needless trial-and-error?

Then no matter what your experience level of business blogging — Marketing With Business Blogs is the competitive advantage you need. Check out the limited special that’s now being offered.

Just click on the manual below…

Enjoy!

John-Paul Micek is known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™. He’s a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin, and a managing partner with the international small business coaching company RPM Success Group Inc.®

The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Have you started using business blogs, podcasts, and RSS to boost your business growth yet? Everyone is talking about blogging, but very few business owners are taking advantage of it the way it should be utilized for maximum profits.

Maybe you’re still sitting on the sidelines, leery to take the first step because you’re not sure what business blogging can do to enhance your marketing. Or maybe you jumped right in and started blogging for your business, but you haven’t seen any results yet.

Well, Deborah and I have some good news for you.

I can tell you from our own experience, and the results dozens of our clients have gotten — there’s no denying the positive impact that business blogging can have in boosting your traffic and winning more clients.

For example, by using business blogs, we took BusinessOwnersCoachingClub.com from sub-100 ranking in Google to consistent top 10 rankings in just 45-days for our top five keywords! And that’s just one small part of the benefits that come from business blogging.

But (and this is a BIG but)… if your business blogging is not done correctly, you’re going to end up with nothing to show after months of hard work except a lot of wasted time. And if you rely on the books, ebooks, or courses on “blogging basics” available out there — you’re not going to be much better off.

The bottom line is, a ten year old can set up a blog in less than 15-minutes. It’s not the “technical” side of blogging that makes the difference between success and failure. It’s the mindset you start out with and the strategies you build on that will determine how effective your business blogging, podcasting, and use of RSS is in attracting prospects and gaining new clients.

So Here’s The Good News

In this Thursday’s upcoming 70-minute live Teleclass we’ll lift the veil of confusion and cut through all the hype to reveal the often mis-understood power of business blogging, podcasts, and RSS.

Click this link for details & limited FREE registration: Business Blogging TeleClass

With what you’ll learn in this 70-minute live call you’ll have a huge jump-start on your competitors. And you’ll have a decided advantage over the vast majority of business bloggers struggling to get it right on their own.

Don’t miss out! To register and grab one of the 87 seats remaining, just go to: Business Blogging TeleClass

John-Paul Micek is known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™. He’s a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin, and a managing partner with the international small business coaching company RPM Success Group Inc.®

The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc.® and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

“Tagging” is currently all the rage among click-and-mortar business owners, business bloggers, and just about anyone else addicted to or immersed in digital content. If you’re not familiar with tagging or how it works, I came across an excellent article that helps explain the process in simple terms. You’ll also learn about the pros, cons, and some of the inevitable detours down the road for tagging.

With this introductory article on tagging you’ll have a better understanding of what tagging is and just how much time you should invest in it right now.

If you’re a digital info junky, you may not be able to resist jumping headlong into tagging (if you’re not already there.) BUT … if you’re a small business owners with limited time — you must test the waters and enter slowly.

How should you start tagging posts, images, and video?

I would never coach a busy business owner to avoid tagging altogether, that would be sticking your head in the sand. However, I also wouldn’t coach an owner to jump into tagging all their existing digital content either.

Start by tagging new content as you produce it. Test by implementing tagging in incremental steps with different types of content. Track your results and let measurable results prove the worthiness of tagging — not the hype.

There are a lot of bugs that need to be worked out of the filtering software for tags, and overly aggressive internet marketers and spammers may crash the system before it even gets going. Let’s hope not though. Tagging has the potential to be the salvation of busy business owners as we attempt to sift through the ever expanding mass of digital data available on the net and our own hard drives.

Be prudent in the amount of time you and your company team dedicate to tagging before it proves itself. If you get started systemizing the tagging of new digital content in small steps you can’t go wrong. If tagging takes off, you’re already started and just have to ramp up your efforts. If it fizzles out, your downside is protected because you didn’t go whole-hog retroactively tagging all your digital content.

If you’d like to learn more about tagging, check out this introductory article on tagging here.

John-Paul Micek
The Click-and-Mortar Business Coach
Business Owners Coaching Club

The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc. and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

I was recently in a forum on Ryze.com, and the question on whether to have a website or not came up, (shockingly from a very brave newbie) with my corresponding answer in the Q&A blog post written yesterday.

I wanted to share that answer with my blog readers, because it’s such a critical question that many ponder, and most people still don’t realize how they can reduce the time it takes to get a website up and running, through the creation of a business blog.

Literally within 10 minutes of creating a business, or business name, you can have a free blog up and running on the internet.

Within 24-48 hours of creating your blog, you can have it crawled by a popular search engine spider like Google. (ah… but that’s a strategy beyond the scope of this blog Q&A.)

If you’re looking for more specifics on how to set up a blog, including free videos that walk you through the process of setting up your first blog in under 10 minutes, you’ll enjoy this link: http://www.AdvancedBusinessBlogging.com

In the meantime, here’s my response to that Question on having a website (or a blog substitute), and what Bill Gates has allegedly said.

>>Coach Deb replies:

Bill Gates was “semi-right” - because there will ALWAYS be people who exist in a “non-connected” universe, while still finding food and water to survive on.

Sure, they may still “BE in business.” BUT - they certainly won’t be THRIVING in it.

But if they took advantage of all the powerful advantages of having both a website and a business blog they could instead attract traffic that converts to clients that churns out CASH!

There are sooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many things you can use a website and a blog for. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

(Boy, I should write copy for a web designer, b/c I can think of at LEAST a dozen different ways that a website can increase the profitability of ANY business - even an old-fashioned brick-and-mortar business who never even considered adding a website to their business marketing plan.)

Show me a business owner who doesn’t want to make a good profit while also having a nice life, and more time on their hands, and I’ll show you someone addicted to a life of hardship and martyrdom.

Perhaps that’s how Bill Gates should have worded it. They may still “be” in business - but they’ll also be complaining and whining about the complexities and hardships of running it all the time.

Deborah Micek
The Communication Coach
Business Owners Coaching Club

The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc. and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Yahoo is expanding its Yahoo Local search service by providing a free web site to business owners that will automatically be integrated into Yahoo Local listings. This aggresive new program is available to any U.S. small business owner who has a physical presence serving a local area. Believe it or not — approximately 50% of businesses in the U.S. stuill do not have a web site according to the Kelsey Group. And Yahoo wants to grab as many of those business owners as possible.

If you’re a small business start up, or if you just have not had the time or energy to get your website up and rolling, Yahoo’s “point and click” site build will get you there quickly.

Free business sites are similar to Yahoo Local enhanced business listings—with a key difference. With both basic (free) and enhanced ($9.95 per month) local listings, businesses submit information directly to Yahoo. This information is merged with other sources of information like maps, user reviews and so on, and is returned in Yahoo Local search results.

The new free business web sites, by contrast, are stand-alone destinations over which an owner has full control, and users can be sent directly to the site’s URL. Yahoo will link to these sites in Local business listings, but perhaps more importantly, even though free business sites are hosted by Yahoo other search engines can crawl them, potentially broadening the scope of exposure for a business.

So, if you already are paying for an enhanced Local listing, should you stop and switch to a free web business web site? That depends on the type of traffic you’re receiving. Enhanced business listings allow you to include additional content in your Yahoo local listing, such as photographs, promotional messaging, additional links and so on, and also provide reporting.

You can get more details and learn how to get your free small business website here.

John-Paul Micek
The Click-and-Mortar Business Coach
Business Owners Coaching Club

The © Copyright to all audio, video, images, and text are held by RPM Success Group Inc. and licensed under a Creative Commons License.

It’s the oldest form of marketing in the world, and it’s the most effective. Now, with the technology consumers and business owners have at their fingertips, Word-of-Mouth Marketing (WOMM) can be leveraged for more bottom-line impact than ever before in history.

Online forums; blogs; vblogs (video blogs); moblogs (blogs fed from mobile phones or PDAs); podcasts; and a host of other emerging technologies all combine to put consumer opinion on multimedia steroids.

WOMM is on the move, and this is not subjective analysis either. A 2004 Forrester/Inteliseek study found “recommendations from others” and “consumer opinions posted online” significantly outranked TV, radio, print, and online advertising on the trust scale. Research from Jupiter Research, NOP World, and Capgemini echo this theme as well.

IF you want to succeed in the marketplace of the new millennium, gaining consumers’ trust is critical. With consumers being exposed to more than 3,000 marketing messages per day, trust is essential to overcoming the clutter and noise of traditional interruption advertising. And most importantly for business owners, trust is an undeniable prerequisite for persuasion.

The reality is that, done correctly, WOMM is a solid strategy for effectively attracting highly qualified prospects to your company’s doorstep.

BEWARE though – WOMM is a powerful tool that cuts both ways

Try to deceive or trick the consumer and blog-powered “word wardens” will snap into action. Try to shaft the consumer and search engines will remind the world of your foolish actions for years by ranking the most scathing testimonials at the top of any search for your company name.

There are strategies and techniques that you must learn, and certain rules that you should adhere to – but don’t be afraid to jump in. The information and coaching you need to successfully market in the 21st-century marketplace is available. The bottom line is, you must make WOMM part of your click-and-mortar growth strategy before your competitors do.

How you can start implementing WOMM immediately

There are two simple steps you can take to begin learning how WOMM works and start integrating it in your business.

1. Dedicate some time each week to be active in online business networks, online communities, and blogs related to your industry or niche. This will begin to give you a feel for the multiplication power that technology and the Internet have on WOMM.

2. Whether your company is large or small, local or national – you should have your own business blog. This will help you build rapport and trust with consumers by giving them insight into your business operations. It’ll equip you to respond immediately to situations in your company or industry. Plus, a properly structured business blog will help you achieve top search-engine rankings too!

You can learn more about this powerful pair of Word-of-Mouth Marketing Multipliers, and learn how to start putting them to work for you and your small business in this special four-part series at AdvancedBusinessBlogging.com.

Taking action on these steps will allow you to build trust, gain permission, and maximize your leverage of WOMM. And when you develop a click-and-mortar growth strategy that integrates permission-based marketing with WOMM – you’ll catapult your company to a leadership position in your industry or niche.

© Copyright 1999-2005 by RPM Success Group ®, All rights reserved. Reproduction in any form without the express written consent of RPM Success Group ® is prohibited. You may use this article/post in it’s entirety as an RSS feed without previous permission, so long as it is published in it’s entirety with all copyright notices. Call RPM Success Group toll free at 888-334-8151 for offline reprint permissions, or by email editor@rpmsuccess.com.

About the Author: John-Paul Micek and his partner Deborah Cole Micek are Business Growth Coaches. They help small business owners like you, achieve profit-doubling growth in one-third the time it would take to do on your own.

In just 12-months with your membership in the www.BusinessOwnersCoachingClub.com you can bridge the digital divide and transform your small business into a click-and-mortar powerhouse that delivers the profits, personal fulfillment, and free time you want.

There’s a new danger for fraud that internet phone services have opened up. It’s something that you should be aware of as both a consumer, and a small business owner. We’ve had a few members of the Business Owners Coaching Club and one private RPM Business Coaching client already get exposed to these new scams. Luckily none were fleeced for any money or critical private information.

Since part of what we do here at the Business Owners Blog is keep you up-to-date on the positives and negatives of new technology, I felt this was something you definitely needed to be aware of.

The problem is that some Internet phone services allow scam artists to make it appear that they’re calling from another phone number. One client of ours even had a call supposedly come in from their local police department soliciting a donation. This “caller id swap” is a useful trick that enables thieves to drain credit accounts and pose as banks or other trusted authorities.

For more information on this dangerous new practice, and ways you can protect yourself and your business clients, check out this in-depth article: http://www.bizreport.com/news/8774/

Time. It’s what every small business owner wants more of. We all wish there were 8 days a week so we could get more done. Right?

Well – thanks to the Internet, more and more business owners are getting business done, meeting new prospects and getting more clients faster than ever before with the use of online networking sites.

Two popular online networking sites that allow business owners to get to know a business contact before ever having an initial conversation are Ryze.com and Ecademy.com.

Both websites allow users to post their profile for free, including their picture and a link to their website, and they each offer additional fee-based upgrades for serious online networkers to use.

While Ryze.com is primarily U.S. based, Ecademy.com is predominantly filled with European business professionals, but both include professionals from all over the world.

Not only are these sites saving business owners from the time-consuming activities that traditional, in-person networking events consume, they also allow you to tap into a global community of business vendors and clients.

While both of these networks allow anyone to join, it’s best if you’re invited by someone with a large network to take advantage of the “networking trails” created by the software that drives these online communities.

A great example of hese networking trails are seen at the top each user’s Ryze.com profile page, with arrows pointing in either direction, telling you who knows the person you are looking up.

Professionals who are serious about doing business with the best vendor love this feature because it allows each visitor to see “who knows who” in order to research whether the new contact is a reputable business owner. Illustrating the concept of “six-degrees of separation” between you and anyone in the world.

Another online networking site that allows women business owners to network, without ever having to leave their home is IVWCC.org (International Virtual Women’s Chamber of Commerce.)

Members of IVWCC.org aren’t your typical “stay at home mom businesses” that may have been popular in years past.

Instead, IVWCC.org is filled with business professionals ranging from Virtual Assistants, who help other small business owners run their business without having to hire an in-person assistant, to Mortgage Brokers and Coaches just to name a few professions, with one thing in common - they’ve all learned how to set up their business model to be able to serve their client from anywhere in the world.

Harvard MBA, David Teten of Nitron Advisors, LLC, co-authored a book The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals with Online Networks with Scott Allen, Texas-based co-founder of the Web site OnlineBusinessNetworks.com that describes how to take advantage of this rapidly growing way to do real business online.

Teten shares several types of “Social software” a professional can take advantage of in order to do more business online. Software that allows you to analyze, build, and leverage your social network. Examples he gives are: “Blogs, relationship capital management software, social network software, web conferencing, email lists, chat, instant messaging, Internet telephony, and virtual communities.”

Scott Allen offers a fantastic Guide to Online Social Networks, Social Software, and Business Communities in addition to a 6-week TeleClass that helps professionals learn how to utilize the most popular sites that connect business people online.

“These networks offer far more effective ways of finding people than a general web search engines, and there’s tremendous value just in being able to not only find people but to be found. It takes minimal effort to set up your profile in a site and it offers low cost, high potential value,” reports Scott Allen.

High value is right! Talk about time saving activities! Especially when you compare it to traditional in-person networking events.

Calculate how long it takes for you to prepare for an evening networking event, get in your car, find a parking spot, stand around eating fried pu-pu’s that you’d never include in your diet regiment, especially since you’re required to skip the gym because of this late night in-person networking event all while you’re trying to search around find the right people that you need to connect with in order to do more business.

Gasp! Hold on one second while I catch my breath!
Then consider “online networking” where just one of your conversations can reach hundreds of people in a fraction of a second – all real time.

Instead of driving all around God’s creation to meet a half-dozen people who may or may NOT be the right contact that you need for your business at the moment, you could be sitting at your computer in your home office while you participate in online discussion groups, adding value to topics relevant to your business and connecting with the right people, at the right time - all because you’re able to scan “who’s who” and “who knows who” in each participant’s profile before ever engaging in an online conversation.

Now THAT’s what I call SWEET! This is Time Mastery at its best.

Consider the fact that one conversation at an in-person networking event ends there. Whereas a conversation on the Internet remains forever. And it’s potentially positioned in front of thousands perhaps millions of online networkers from around the world - today, this week, and the months to come.

So… if you really want to save time and meet more potential clients and vendors than ever before - go to Ryze.com or Ecademy.com right now and begin by posting your profile. Feel free to ask me for an invitation, or just use the links in this blog post to get you directly to each of these online networking sites - and begin Power Networking!

About the Author:
Deborah Micek is a Business Development Coach at RPM Success Group Inc. Gain access to expanded articles at www.GetCoachedForFree.com

This article was recently published in the Business section of the daily Hawaii Newspaper, The Star Bulletin.